Jack Dorsey pledges $US1b of Square stake for virus relief

Jack Dorsey is devoting $US1 billion ($1.6 billion) of his stake in Square, the payments firm he co-founded, to help fund the coronavirus relief effort.

"After we disarm this pandemic, the focus will shift to girl's health and education, and UBI," Dorsey said in a tweet, referring to universal basic income. The pledge represents about 28 per cent of his wealth, he said.

Jack Dorsey. Paul Jeffers

Dorsey, also the co-founder of Twitter, has a net worth of about $US3.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

While other billionaires have announced significant donations to combat the pandemic and the anticipated economic turmoil, Dorsey's pledge is by far the biggest announced so far.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, will donate $US100 million to Feeding America. Michael and Susan Dell have committed another $US100 million to global relief efforts, while the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged a similar amount to develop a vaccine and pay for detection, isolation and treatment efforts.

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Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman said in a Bloomberg TV interview that the pandemic will wipe $US5 trillion from GDP. The US jobless rate has jumped to 4.4 per cent – the highest since 2017 – from a half-century low of 3.5 per cent, and is expected to surge in the coming months.

This is not the first time Dorsey has announced a large stock pledge. In 2015, shortly after Twitter laid off roughly 8 per cent of its employees, Dorsey announced that he was donating almost $US200 million in Twitter stock back to the employee grant pool. It was about a third of his total stake in the company.

"I'd rather have a smaller part of something big than a bigger part of something small. I'm confident we can make Twitter big!" he tweeted at the time.

More than 10,000 people poured into the nation's capital on the ninth day of protests over police brutality, but what awaited them was a city that no longer felt as if it was being occupied by its own country's military.

More than 10,000 people poured into the nation's capital on the ninth day of protests over police brutality, but what awaited them was a city that no longer felt as if it was being occupied by its own country's military.